Friday Round Up: Locke it Up

Voltron is nearly here and Netflix has released an official trailer. Voltron himself seems to have less pouty lips but otherwise looks pretty great. And the team is a bit more diverse instead of being five white guys. I was only half aware of Voltron when it originally aired here in the States. I was in early grade school. But I’m kind of excited for this take on it. The voice cast includes Steven Yuen and Tyler Labine among other cool choices. Looks fun.

Read on for lots of cool news. New comic book adaptations into TV shows. Documentaries on a fan film that will blow your mind. Changes at Disney. Tons more. This is a good one.

TV

Locke & Key was a fantastic horror comic book by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. Seriously, I strongly recommend it. In 2011, there was a pilot made for a potential TV series but Fox didn’t pick it up. But now it’s ramping up again for a second attempt, this time with Hill himself writing the pilot script and serving as an executive producer. IDW Entertainment (the publishers of the book) and Circle of Confusion (The Walking Dead, The Path) are the production company. I really hope this happens. It’s such an amazing story about these magical keys that unlock amazing supernatural abilities but only kids can see them. And there’s a dark otherworldly menace hiding in the well behind the house that holds the keys. It’s actually pretty epic.

The showrunner of Jessica Jones as well as star Krysten Ritter both confirmed that they’re about to start filming season two. No word on who the big bad for season two is, but Ritter did say that it will film back to back with the Defenders crossover TV show. She said she’s already working on her strength conditioning for the long shoot and that the two shows’ shooting schedules may even overlap a bit.

MOVIES

Maybe you’ve heard this story before, maybe you haven’t, but in 1982 three eleven-year old friends began shooting a shot for shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark with their home video cameras. It took them years to finish. Now there’s a documentary about how they accomplished it and what they went through over the years. It’s an amazing story about friendships growing, changing, even growing apart. It’ll be in limited release next month and then OnDemand. Check the official site for showtimes.

Uh oh. The reviews for the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse movie are mixed at best. The consensus seems to be that Bryan Singer has not perfected things in his fourth X-Men movie, but instead overloaded it to bloat similar to X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Sounds like hardcore fans might be able to enjoy it but it won’t appeal to the mainstream much. The trailers look nuts.

Recently, fans realized that Captain America should be owed a lot of back pay by the US Army since he never died. He just fell into suspended animation and woke up 60 years later. It got enough discussion that an actual response was issued! Army spokesman Wayne Hall issued a response to Business Insider:

If Capt. Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) were not a fictional character and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance and recovery actually real, he may actually be entitled to receive back pay…However, a wide variety of variables would have to be taken into consideration to actually calculate the true amount of back pay to which he would be entitled to receive; given that he is a fictional character we cannot truly capture all of those variables accurately.

Wayne’s rough calculations came out to $4.6 million dollars. Not quite enough to compete with Tony Stark, but if he wanted to retire to a small island, he could.

THEME PARKS

Next month, Disney will open its new Shanghai Disneyland theme park and it will include a ride based on TRON. Inside the Magic posted the above video of the new indoor rollercoaster ride. No current plans for this ride to appear at any other Disneys, unfortunately!

In related news, Disney announced they will be retiring Disney Dollars. These were basically just currency that had their cartoon characters on it that you could exchange within the park at their stores. It was a one for one exchange for real money. It’ll remain valid currency if you ever come across some in an old photobook or something. But more realistically, it’ll start to be worth more as a collector’s item on eBay.

GAMES

In even more Disney news, they announced this week that they are ending their production of Disney Infinity figures and downloadable content for gaming consoles. Apparently it just never really took off and they posted over $100 million in losses for the game last year. They’ll release two more packs in June and then that’s it. They’re also shutting down their Avalanche Studios game developers so that’s 300 folks looking for jobs. Disney simply decided it’s more lucrative to license their brand to other game developers. I wonder if Lego will snatch that up? They have a lot of licenses for their similar toy-to-game Lego Dimensions. But I’m not convinced that’s selling so well. You can buy the starter package for at least 30% off these days at certain stores.

In additional gaming news, this is a feel-good article to read. It’s about how a school for autistic kids in Australia uses Minecraft as a learning tool. I thought it was sweet.

COMICS

A photo posted by Jason Latour (@jasonlatour) on May 11, 2016 at 10:58am PDT

Spider-Gwen co-creator Jason Latour posted the above exchange to his Instagram. Basically, some guy is really pissed off that Spider-Gwen exists because that means Spider-Gwen toys have been made and that prevents him from getting other characters that he likes as toys. The entitlement is just dripping off this guy. I guess he’s a Men’s Rights Activist or something. I feel bad for Jason. He’s created a really popular book that is especially resonating with women and children, and yet he gets berated on social media for it from dudes that aren’t happy that they don’t have enough toys.

BOOKS

Finally, George R.R. Martin posted a new chapter from his next Game of Thrones (technically A Song of Ice and Fire but we all know it as Game of Thrones) novel. But before you get excited and think that means he’s made actual progress you should know that he’s been reading this chapter at public events since 2011. This is just the first time he’s shared it online. There’s every chance in the world that he has some chapters that didn’t make the last book and he still hasn’t written anything new in years. It’s a chapter about Arianne. If you only watch the show, that character doesn’t exist there. She’s the daughter of Prince Doran Martell and by Dornish laws, next in line for the Dornish throne. Ellaria Sand on the show basically has her role. Very similar motivations/goals.